Love On The Dole - The Novel

The Novel

Walter Greenwood's novel (1933) was written during the early 1930s as a response to the crisis of unemployment, which was being felt locally, nationally, and internationally. It is set in Hanky Park, an industrial slum in Salford, where Greenwood was born and brought up. The novel begins around the time of the General Strike of 1926, but its main action takes place in 1931.

The novel follows the Hardcastle family as they are pulled apart by mass unemployment. The fourteen-year-old Harry Hardcastle starts the novel working in a pawn shop, but is attracted to the glamour of working in the engineering factory Marlowes. After seven years working there as an apprentice, he is laid off in the midst of the Great Depression, and is thereon unable to find work. He becomes romantically involved with a girl on his street, Helen, whom he gets pregnant; this forces them to marry, despite the fact that Harry now not only is unemployed but also has been taken off the dole by the Means Test. Sally Hardcastle, his older sister, falls in love with a doomed socialist agitator, Larry Meath, and suffers the unwelcome attention of the local illicit bookmaker, Sam Grundy. Sally feels unable to compete with Meath's socialist intellectualism, highlighting not only the economic but also the intellectual poverty of the local working-class community. The novel's climax focuses on an actual march, in which the NUWM marched on Salford Town Hall in October 1931. The march itself was met with violent police resistance; in the book, Larry Meath dies as a result of blows to the head from a policeman's truncheon. After Larry Meath's death, Sally despondently succumbs to the attentions of Sam Grundy, which allows both her father and brother finally to find work.

The novel received much attention from writers, journalists, and politicians, who were all moved by its description of poverty, but, more importantly, by its account of a working-class community attempting to deal with that poverty with dignity and intelligence. Reviewing the American edition of the novel, Iris Barry wrote that, "Love on the Dole is the real thing." Edith Sitwell, for example, also wrote "I do not know when I have been so deeply, terribly moved." It was a commercial success, with three impressions that year, and eight more by 1939.

Greenwood said he "tried to show what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a lost generation who are denied consummation, in decency, of the natural hopes and desires of youth."